


The Definition of Sentience

by ArtieH



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Destiny, Guns, Lots of guns, Robots, people being badass
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-11
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-26 04:10:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6223348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtieH/pseuds/ArtieH
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I could be dramatic and say 'I never asked for this', but I did. When Arkin came to me I had been a ball of pulverised meat on a gurney, barely alive. They promised to give me a new body, make me special, make me the first of a new race. And they delivered, they really did."<br/>"What I didn't ask for was for the entire solar system to go down the pan while I was turned off."</p>
<p>An engineering student from the Golden Age wakes up in the ruins of his university and a Ghost hanging over his head. The Ghost think's it's found an early model Exo who it can shape into a new champion of the Light; little does it know it's stumbled across a Guardian who's anything but, swears a lot, and may hold the secrets to how the Exo's became what they are today.</p>
<p>Rated M for combat scenes and a serious potty-mouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. BASe - Boot Activation Sequence

Initial BASe was always the worst fucking experience you could have.  
Everything was in the wrong place, everything was cold or seized up, nothing came on in the right order. I had only been through this a couple of times before but this definitely took top prize for shittyness.  
“Wake up. Wake up guardian,”  
Well at least auditory systems were online. Nothing visual yet. Working on it was the answer I was getting back from process control subroutines.  
God I missed my biological brain.  
“IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-”  
“No! Nononono! Shhhh! Shut UP!” The voice hissed over my malfunctioning verbal systems. It took a blast of some sort of condensed energy beam to switch the noise off. “They’ll hear us! Just...just don’t move and hang on. I’ll see if I can get you working,”  
What, like I was a car engine? If whoever this was made an oil change joke, I swear to God I would stick the thick end of my fist up their arseholes. It wasn’t someone I recognised; maybe one of the undergrads coming in to tinker out of hours. I tried calling up my internal system clock but it had lost sync and was showing the date as the first of January 1970.  
What is it with that date and computers?  
~System intrusion detected. Locking-~  
~Nevermind~  
Errrmm...  
Whatever was scratching around in my head quickly shunted my process management out of the window and took over, re-ordering about 45% of my systems in a matter of seconds.  
“Ok, try talking now. And quietly, please,” The voice said in a hushed tone.  
“Hello?” I said, trying to modulate my voice. It still sounded very loud in the otherwise silent lab, the hum of machines was absent and I couldn’t hear anything from robotics next door. Odd.  
“That’s good! Hang on, I’ll try and get visuals up. Wow, you really are old school aren’t you?”  
“Who are you? How are you doing this?” I said, trying to keep track of everything this apparent techno-wizard was up to and failing completely. They were moving too fast, this hard to be some sort of AI but it was-  
Oh, here come the visual systems. It was pitch dark and I only had natural spectrum at hand (they had promised to give me an infra-red receiver plate at some point but that hadn’t materialized, like a lot of things…) so there wasn’t much to see but there was a light being cast by what looked like a floating box over my head. It blinked at me, the little triangle of blue light at its center winking on and off like an eye.  
“I’ve found you! I almost can’t believe it!” The box said.  
“What the hell are you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the box suspiciously.  
“I’m a Ghost. Your ghost now. It’s a long story but right now we need to get you out of here. I made a diversion on the other side of the complex but the Fallen are going to be heading back inside any moment now,” The box said. “Hang on, I’m going to try and get you moving. You’ve been laying here a long time but most of your joints haven’t rusted up. We might need to replace your right knee though,”  
“Where is Doctor Arkin? Who let you in here? And why-” My voice cut out, a block put on that system.  
“I’m really sorry but right now is not a great time. Once we’re safe back at the Tower, I really, really promise we can explain everything but right now we’ve got no weapons, ten miles of enemy territory between us and the transmat zone and you’re not in the best shape. Oh, come on this should be-ah! There we go! Hey!”  
Motor systems came online I took a swipe at the box and completely missed, my right arm a stiff unbending log attached to my shoulder joint which squealed in protest. Everything else came to varying degrees of life and I slowly sat up on the bench. I was covered in dust, caked in the stuff. I looked around the lab and had the robotic equivalent of my stomach drop out of me. The partition with robotics department was shattered, the hardened Plexiglas plate turned into little clear dice of tempered glass on the floor that looked like it had been dusted with ash. A skeleton lay amongst the shattered window, grinning at me.  
“I know it’s a lot to take in, but you need to stay calm,” The ghost said, now floating out of arms reach.  
Calm?! What the fuck was there to be calm about here?! I stood up and nearly fell over, my right knee was locked shut and wouldn’t bend at all. Rust. I jabbed a finger at my mouth, trying to make it clear I wanted use of my own functions back.  
“I’m sorry but we don’t have time. The Fallen are going to be back any second now and I’ve been looking for you for too long to-”  
Somewhere in the dark I could hear the crunching of many feet, maybe a floor away, couldn’t really tell with my crude auditory systems. I looked at the skeleton on the floor, trying to guess how long it had been laying there to have decomposed completely to the bleached bones. Not even the clothing had survived. At least a couple of hundred years, probably longer.  
“Come on, I know a way out,” The Ghost hissed and floated through the shattered window into the robotics bay. I tried to balance myself, internal gyros working overtime to compensate for the lack of usable right leg but I managed a hobbling walk out after the Ghost, barely staying upright. I remembered Doctor Arkin’s advice the first time I stood up on my new legs, clinging onto the support frame with him standing at the other end like a father encouraging his child to take their first steps (which to be honest wasn’t a bad analogy). ‘Nothing has changed, you’ve still got two legs, you’ve still got two arms, all the joints are the same. What’s so hard about something you’ve been doing all your life?’  
Yeah, it was something I was quite good at right up to the moment I died.  
In the low light I trod on some finger bones, crushing them into dust under my feet. The sound made me flinch.  
There were no more bodies in robotics but there were plenty of signs of both time passing and of battles being fought. Layer upon layer of dust coated everything and laser and small arms fire had scarred the walls and taken out more of the glass partitions that separated the labs.  
All of this was ancient, the mineral oil in the tanks along the walls completely dried, dust everywhere, the remains of papers reduced to crumbling piles of dust, machinery that had been cared for religiously coated in rust. It wasn’t exactly how I remembered it either; things had been moved, Doctor Glock’s prize orchid had been replaced by a CAM lathe, the information posters on the walls had changed. It might of been a trick of the light but the walls had changed colour too, the large painted ARM logo replaced with plain whitewash.  
I swung my leg forward as fast as I dared, stress alarms going off in the joints but I didn’t care.  
What the hell had happened. How long had I been de-activated?  
“Through here,” The Ghost emitted a tight beam of light on a security grille, one of the emergency vents that would vacuum out the labs in the event of a hazardous substance incident. It was a two-foot-wide by two-foot-tall square. I’d have to crawl through, almost impossible with my locked up leg and malfunctioning motor control. And in any case, that vent didn’t lead anywhere. It went straight to the atmospheric control hub on the surface level which has an entirely sealed system. I tried to take another swipe at the Ghost, get its attention and tell it how stupid its idea was but it was hovering too far out of reach, its blue circular eye glancing from me, to the grill, to the stairs on the other end of the lab. It had gone quiet upstairs.  
“Get in! Come on come on!” It said, the moving plates that made up an almost shell like structure around it shivering, almost what I would class as fearful behaviour. I jabbed my hand at my mouth again.  
“Oh for peats sake. I’m not giving you your voice back yet, it’s too dangerous. Just get in the-” In hindsight, really immature, and if I had known the danger we were in I would never had done it, but I did the sulking child thing, folded my arms and leant against the wall. It was the sort of thing my mother would have slapped me round the side of the head for but the Ghost could only shudder in anger.  
“You cannot be serious. We are stood in the middle of...”  
I just shrugged. Had I been in possession of finer motor control I would have raised my eyebrows. At least what they hadn’t put into building me night vision they had made giving me facial expressions at least.  
“Alright! Alright! Fine. Just...hang on,” The Ghost hissed. It didn’t do anything for a moment, just floating there, then a beam of light hit me in the side of the head. I was worried for a moment it had done something to take control of my motor functions but instead a set of commands were made available to me, ready to be executed into my visual sub-processes. I checked them to make sure there wasn't anything malicious in there, then ran them.  
~...kward stupid pig-headed moron, why couldn't I have got someone-~  
~It’s working~ I sent back at the Ghost.  
~Good. Now please get in the damn vent~ It sent back. The infra-red bits were exchanging didn’t exactly allow for much in the way in inflection or tone but I got the idea that it was upset with me. I also could only “hear” what it was “saying” when I was looking at it so the intra-red sensor in my optical systems could receive the flashes of non-visible light. It was like trying to have a conversation using ancient television remotes pointed at each other, but at least it was silent.  
~If I get in the damn vent are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?~ I asked.  
~Yes! Can you just get us out of sight!~ The Ghost replied. Well it was progress at least. Not much but some.  
The vent was screwed into the wall with hexagonal bolts, not the sort of thing you could pry off. I went back into the robotics lab, found a torque wrench and began going at the bolts. Every click of the wrench was far too loud and by the time I had got the sixth and final bolt off I could hear something moving upstairs. Some of the urgency the Ghost had been feeling was finally starting to bleed through.  
The grille came away in my hands and I lifted it to one side, allowing enough space for me to slide into the vent but close enough so I could pull it back across. The vent opened up in front of me, a yawning cube of even deeper darkness.  
Above us a door banged open. Had I been wearing pants or had a digestive tract to speak of, I would have shat them, the noise almost making me drop the grille. Ok, really not wanting to be here right now, not time to let claustrophobia get in the way. I got into the vent and pulled the grille back into place once I was inside. I was only able to prop it up, the bolt holes all on the wrong side of the hole. All I could do was slowly slide my way belly first, keeping the sound of scraping metal on metal to a minimum, to the first corner of the vent and sit there just out of sight, clinging to my wrench in the dark as something made its way into the lab. The light of the Ghost’s eye was all I could see, wide and fearful.  
~Fallen~ It sent. ~Don’t. Move.~  
I didn’t know what it meant by Fallen but judging from the guttural clicking and the low hiss of breathing I could hear echoing down the vent, it wasn’t human.  
Fear. I was feeling fear. My scientist brain was marvelling at this fact but right now the animal fight or flight bit of my brain was too busy screaming at me. I’d probably just answered one of the biggest questions of the modern age, an artificially housed intelligence was capable of fear and the desire for self-preservation. According to 85% of the ethics and phycology department, I was now officially a sentient being.  
Yay me.  
The Fallen moved around the lab, further away from the opening of the vent, knocking against desks, crunching over broken glass, sniffing and grunting in some language that I didn’t understand at all. It came close to the vent, walking past the aperture without breaking step, and continued on.  
Another voice, calling, from further above but in the vent it was too reverberated to pinpoint. The Fallen in the lab replied, clicking and snarling to itself as it came past the vent one more time and finally up the stairs. The door banged again, silence fell. We sat like that for a long time in the dark; I’m pretty sure my grip was bending the wrench out of shape. I looked at the Ghost.  
~I’m sorry. I’ve been looking for you for too long to risk losing you.~ The Ghost sent. ~What is your name?~  
~Felix Kaplan. You?~ I sent.  
~I’m just Ghost. It’s a pleasure to meet you Felix. It’s an odd name for an Exo, if you don’t mind me saying.~  
~What’s a...I’m a...it’s sort of complicated.~ I sent back. Last thing I needed right now is an inquisition.  
~Hmm...well, Guardians usually are.~ The Ghost sent.  
~Are what?~  
~Complicated~  
~Oh~  
~We better get-~  
~I’ve got so many questions. Last thing I remember is being shut down for maintenance and then this. How long was I offline?~ I asked. The Ghost bobbed around in the vent.  
~What was the last date you can remember?~ The Ghost asked.  
~I’m not sure. My clock de-synced~  
~Well, from what I can guess, this building was abandoned during the first days of the Collapse. It’s a guess, but you’ve been de-activated for approximately three hundred and fifty years, maybe longer.~  
Holy. Fuck.  
~How is that possible? What happened?~  
~The Darkness happened. Do you not remember anything? The Fallen, the Vex? I would have thought you would have known something. Did you see active service?~ The Ghost didn’t offer any further information and just hung there in the dark. I got the feeling it was thinking rather hard. So far only more questions had sprung up to meet my answers. This was a conversation for another time.  
~We need to get out of here.~ I sent, suppressing the desire to keep asking questions to focus on the job at hand. The Ghost nodded, wavering in the air for a moment before twisting round and drifting down the vent. I flattened myself onto my front and began a slow arduous army crawl after the little machine as it bobbed along in front of me, lighting the way with its pale blue eye.  
Everything seemed horribly loud inside the vent but I knew it was more the enclosed space than anything else. Had I been in my biological body still, I would have had my heart pounding, my breath rushing through my lungs, nervous shaking. I was still scared, but at least I had none of the autonomic responses that came with it any more.  
I crawled for what seemed like hours, the network of vents criss-crossing every lab in the basement. The Ghost seemed to know where it was going better than I did, my knowledge of the facility didn’t exactly extend into the ducting system so I followed without comment. I recognised a few rooms as we went past their grills, some had lights hanging from brackets rammed into the walls, obviously inhabited. One of them the Ghost had to nudge me past as I came to a stop to stare out from our hiding place. The computer lab had been turned into an execution chamber, I could see a pile of bones at one end of the room, at least twenty skulls strewn across the floor. The wall they were piled against was pockmarked with weapons fire and stained with ancient blood spatter.  
Oh God above what had happened? This had to be some sort of malfunction. A simulation. Nightmare? A dream?  
Android dreaming of electric sheep, hehe.  
Oh for fuck’s sake grow up.  
Eventually we ran out of flat vent to crawl along and came to the upward master intake into the filtration system. Except as I looked up the vertical vent, there was no turbine for the filtration system, there were stars, the vent ending about twenty meters up.  
~The side of the building collapsed a few centuries ago so the vent actually leads outside. We’re on the right side of the Fallen but they may still be patrolling. I’ll go up, make a distraction, you just run as fast as you can north east, there is a tree line we can hide in until we work out our next move.~ The Ghost sent.  
~How exactly are you going to make a distraction?~ I sent.  
~I can be very agitating~ The Ghost sent back. ~You worry about running and getting shot at. I’ll worry about distracting a horde of blood thirsty scavengers and also getting shot at~  
~They have guns?~  
~Of course they have guns, they’re Fallen. Shooting things and scavenging is all they’re good at. Now come on, we’ve only got a few hours of night left.~  
I looked up the vent and tried to work out the best way to deal with this. At times like these I wish I’d been more outdoorsy.  
Basing my technique off what I had seen in the movies, I braced my back against the wall of the vent and pushed my feet against the opposite wall. Luckily Arkin had rubberised the soles of my feet to make sure I didn’t skid everywhere so I got good purchase on the wall. Slowly I began to climb the vent, locking as many joints as I could to prevent any chance of falling. The last thing I needed was to drop my seventy kilo metal body into a metal vent that would carry the resulting cacophony throughout the entire lab like a giant organ pipe. It took twenty minutes to reach the top of the vent, my locked right leg slowing me to a few centimetres every awkward shuffling step up the wall. The vent had been torn open at the top, the ragged metal razor sharp. Luckily that didn’t bother me and as soon as I could I grabbed hold of the side, digging my titanium alloy fingers into the flimsy aluminium.  
“Give me a few minutes. You’ll know when to run,” The Ghost whispered with its actual voice next to my head, then rose up and out of the shaft. I hung there, expecting maybe some sort of signal or code. I took the machine gun fire as my queue and pulled myself out of the vent, collapsing into the rubble six feet below. Some things broke and I laid there for a second, trying to work out what was going on.  
Pain. I was feeling pain.  
That hadn’t been part of the design.  
Move you useless hunk of junk! That Ghost didn’t bring you back to life just so you could lay there!  
Fair point.  
Servos L12 to LL14 were over stressed and were giving me warnings which I completely ignored as I stood up, took my bearings and began to run. The building had collapsed in on itself, turning the six storey block of laboratories into a hill of broken brickwork and twisted metal down which I now ran away from the crack of weapons fire. The Fallen’s screeching echoed off the walls, the gunfire sounding far too close. I hoped the Ghost was Ok, it had saved me after all now it was doing the same again as I turned tail and ran.  
A deafening explosion made the entire ruin shudder and creak, setting off little landslides under my feet that nearly sent me tumbling. The sooty light of a fire-plume bathed everything in front of me red for a moment before dying back to pale moonlight. I just ran, toward a line of trees where once there had been a neatly tended lawn that had centuries ago encircled the rear of the building. I didn’t so much as hazard a look back as I ran/hobbled toward safety, too afraid to look back and find some further horror chasing me. Bones and shattered bricks cracked under my feet, the entire building now in motion as it began to collapse and cast up a billowing dust cloud.  
Run. Just run. Run fast enough and this may all be left behind you.  
So I did. I ran down the hill of bone and broken building, diving between the tress, jumping over roots, racing up and down ancient bomb craters, and I didn’t stop until my leg could finally take no more. The servos actually smoking as their motors began to burn out. It was agonising, worse than any runners cramp, I felt like I had been shot.  
I collapsed against the trunk of an ancient elm tree and just stopped. Emotional exhaustion, the pain of my leg, it had finally hit me now and right now all I wanted to do was curl up in the roots of this tree and switch off forever.  
It might have been slightly melodramatic, but I couldn’t help thinking; why the fuck me?  
I turned off my motor functions and layer there, silent and almost invisible, staring up at the moon dappled tree canopy waving in the wind.


	2. RuFIT - Run For It

After a while I sat up, joints groaning as they seized up.  
In the distance the sound of gunfire had reduced to only a handful of shots, distant and muffled by the forest all around. I didn't hear or see any sign of pursuit, perhaps I had got away without incident. That still left the Ghost unaccounted for though. And I couldn't even call out to it, my verbal processes were still locked. This was just like my first days as I had laid on the table, at the mercy of someone else's ability to flick a switch on and off in my own body. I had sworn at the time that no one would be able to do that again. Arkin promised he had been working on some sort of command control system so I could lock other people out. But that had been a few centuries ago, more important things appeared to have taken president.  
While I had been in the lab, I had been just about prepared to write all of this, the Ghost, the bodies, the evidence of my own eyes, off as some sort of farce or a bad sim. But now I was out of the lab, in the open air, surrounded by a forest that from my perspective had grown overnight over a university campus of nearly half a million of the brightest people in the solar system, now I was beginning to believe. I had been through simulations before I had been downloaded into this body. I knew what they felt like. This was not one of them.  
Be calm. Hysteria at this point does not help you.  
So the facts as they stood: I had been reactivated by a hitherto unknown artificial intelligence using technology way beyond our current capabilities. I had been saved from an alien race called the Fallen who it appears had invade Earth some time ago. And it's been over three hundred years, maybe longer since you were last woken up.  
When you laid it out like that it didn't sound too bad.  
Priority one: Find the Ghost.  
I went to stand up and fell over again, clattering into the leaf litter.  
New priority one: fix myself.  
I got myself into a stable position and began to self-diagnose. It had been the first process I had written when they woke me up, mainly to make sure someone hadn’t removed anything important during my down periods.  
Initial report:  
Left side servo and actuation engines over stressed. Seek replacement.  
Damage to front panel A23. Seek replacement.  
Damage to panels C23, C43, F3, F6-G9. Restorative action required.  
Power Cells 1 and 5 depleted. Recommend ejection and safe disposal. Remaining cells at 53% capacity.  
Joint 4 reporting actuation failure. Recommend full replacement of sections 4a to 4c.  
I didn't bother reading the rest, if got the idea; in short, this body was fucked. And it was being rather optimistic if it thought I was going to be able to find a whole new right leg in the middle of a wood.  
In the pale light it was rather hard to see exactly the state my leg was in but I could tell that the joint itself was sound, it was the coupling that held the two disparate parts of thigh and calf together that had locked my leg straight. While the majority of the chassis I occupied was a very tough titanium-carbon nanowire alloy, the major socket joints were either memoplast, a sort of semi-rigid plastic, or magnetised bearings. And that meant neodymium, which meant iron, with then means rust, metal's worst enemy. In the original designs the magnets were sealed inside a bubble of mineral oil to prevent this from happening but if over the years those little pockets had ruptured and drained, the iron in the magnets would have been exposed to air, giving me a lovely coat of iron oxide.  
I stretched my leg out in front of me, did a final check around me to make sure no one was lurking, then started to remove my leg. Without tools it took a while but after a few minutes I was sitting back up with my calf and attached foot in my hands. Even in the poor light and with my eyes set to highest sensitivity, I could see the exposed magnet in the lower section, the once silvery ovoid looking like it was coated in a bloody red fungus. I unclipped it with some difficulty from the joint, checked it over to make sure it hadn't cracked anywhere, then began rubbing it into the bark of the tree.  
Without a fine laser file or some dissolving agent, manual removal of the rust was the only option. This was a supremely stupid thing to do and if anyone on my robotics team had seen what I was doing I would have expected them to slap me. One crack, even a gouge in the relatively soft metal, and the finely magnetised lump would split, becoming totally useless and leaving me literally with no leg to stand on. But until I cleared off the good half centimeter thick buildup of rust, I wasn't going anywhere at all. I cleared off all three of the magnets in the joint and replaced them, then my leg. It took two attempts to get everything back in the right place but for the first time in three hundred years I could bend my knee.  
Ok, now to find the Ghost.  
I stood up and did a few circuits of the tree to test my now much more mobile leg before heading off in a north easterly direction, following my internal magnometer. Now I could actually move my leg, progress was faster but I wasn't winning any races. The rest of my body was still crying out for a service and these were parts I couldn't just smash together in hope they'd start working again. As I walked I sent out infra red pings, blinking on and off every few seconds to try and attract the Ghost’s attention. Hopefully, the Fallen shared the same visual spectrum as humans and I wasn't just broadcasting my location. Not that I knew exactly where my location was right now outside of "in a wood".  
As I walked, I picked out the occasional bit of evidence that trees had not always ruled here. A piece of foundation stuck up through the ground, a pile of rubble, even half a bench slowly being engulfed by a tree that had grown up in between the gaps in the legs. Signs of warfare also, bomb craters, some so large and steep that I could only walk around, shattered sections of building, what looked like part of a tank. All of this was ancient history, long forgotten. There was going to be none of my world left, I knew it.  
The miles ticked by and I continued on, utterly alone. There was no sound of gunfire or the Fallen either though which was a plus. All I had to do was reach this transmat area; not that I knew what one of those looked like. I had heard of matter transmission technology being used in my own time but it was classified, Military only, not the sort of thing a university engineer would be able to get hold of even if he was more qualified than most of the monkeys they employed in military technology research programs.  
Another thought occurred to me; what about the Traveller? Surely it must have done something to stop all of this happening? Some sort of defense, a shield, a weapon? It had always been the wellspring of resource when it came to any form of technology, I owed my current continued existence to information it had willfully provided. It wouldn’t have allowed all of this, not unless it had been met by a similar or greater force.  
I wished now that I hadn’t spoken with the Ghost more while we were in the relative safety of the lab.  
Dawn broke. Where the trees gave way to sky I looked up and saw the black star filled heavens turn grey, then purple, then pale blue, utterly cloudless. I had no sensation of heat, it hadn’t been considered a priority when this body was being designed but I guessed it was probably quite cold. It was some time after this that the Ghost found me. Luckily it announced itself ahead of time before speeding out from between the trees so I didn’t completely shit myself.  
“Good, so you’re not dead,” The Ghost said cheerfully, coming to a stop in front of me and hanging there. “Are you alright? And damage?”  
I gave the Ghost a tired look, eventually it got the hint and a second later my verbal processes unlocked.  
“Sorry,” It said sheepishly.  
“S’okey,” I said, modulating my voice into a rough approximation of my old voice, a mix I had been told of Flax Fields Martian English and Queen’s English. “I’m Ok as I can be,”  
“Not very then,” The Ghost said. “Look I’m really sorry we had to go through that. I hope I can make it up to you,”  
“You’ve saved my life twice in the same day, I don’t owe you anything. It’d be nice to know what is going on though,” I said and eased myself down onto the floor, leaning back against something that was either a section of blown up building or a large rock. The Ghost floated there for a moment and I guessed it wasn’t too pleased at the idea of sitting there wasting time instead of talking on the move but I was tired and needed a rest before bits started falling off me.  
“Alright. What do you want to know?” The Ghost said and came down to my level.  
“Start at the beginning,” I said. If the little machine could have pulled a face it would have. But dutifully, it began to talk. There were gaps in its knowledge and there wasn’t actually much to describe. It painted a world that flipped on its head and left little to nothing behind, a short, bloody and painful tale of how a civilization was firebombed overnight and whoever was left had only the ashes for comfort.  
The off-world colonies, gone. Earth, annihilated. The human race, almost extinct. Our greatest works, destroyed or usurped. Our enemy, just as ragged and desperate as us, now clinging on to whatever footholds they can and warring between themselves, spurred on by this ‘Darkness’ as much as we were by the ‘Light’.  
Then came the story of the Guardians. Of all other things, this was the very strangest. Long dead, ordinary people, returned from the dead to take up the fight the Traveller had left us. And not just robotic intelligences like myself, actual dead people, human beings who had been in the ground as skeletons reanimated and given deadly power against the Darkness.  
“But...how?” This was my first question in what felt like a good hour of the Ghost speaking.  
“Death is not a barrier to the Light,” The Ghost said, not in any way helpful.  
“But a dead body is a dead body. A person is a brain, nerves, a mind state. If all that’s left is bone, how can that be reconstituted into a person?” I said, trying to make sense of this.  
“If a person is touched by the Light, it forms a sort of anchor, a tether that a Ghost can pull on and return them to this world. I would have thought you would have understood, think of it like a shell transfer. If your current body was damaged, you could be transferred to a new shell or have a new one on standby within a transmat buffer. All you’d have to do is provide a replicated copy of the body, then pull the spirit back into it. Quite simple really.”  
“But I’m not an Exo, I’m a...” I trailed off, suddenly feeling very vulnerable. The Ghost blinked at me.  
“Errm...well, you sort of are. Lack of pink fleshy bits tends to indicate that,” The Ghost said.  
“I wasn’t made an Exo, I was born human. I had another body before this one,” I said. No one outside of the lab had known about me, not even my family. I had been sworn to secrecy when I had been approached by Arkin, a bag of pulverized meat laying in a hospital bed, barely able to nod my consent. I had given up everyone in order to get another shot at life. But considering now that everyone else I knew from that second life was long since dead there wasn’t much more guilt I could feel by divulging this secret.  
“Before this, I was in an accident. A train crash that left me barely alive, paralysed, on life support permanently. A scientist in the same building as me heard and he told me about a project he was working on, a way to digitise a human mind and put it inside a computer system,” I said.  
“Why would anyone want to do that? Artificial intelligence had already been done. Did the Exo’s have sentience by this time?” The Ghost asked.  
“The Exo’s? They became sentient?” I asked, stunned.  
“No one knows exactly when they did it, but at some point a subroutine was introduced into many Exo’s, it gave them their own consciousness. Some people say it happened during the Collapse, some say before. But they definitely didn’t have sentience during your time?” The Ghost asked.  
“I honestly don’t know. I was turned on and off so many times. Sometimes they wouldn't turn me back on for months if they thought my mind state may degrade. Anything could have happened while I was switched off,” I said.  
“I see. So they digitised your mind and put it into this body?” The Ghost said.  
“It took a while, but yeah, they put me in here. I take it no-one else had this done to them?” I said.  
“No. You’re the first I’ve certainly heard of, and I’ve been around for a long time,” The Ghost said and I got the impression it had a lot more to say but it didn’t want to right now.  
There had been a reason that Arkin’s project had been kept top secret. Even with human beings living well into their third century, the prospect of a procedure that would allow someone’s mind - what many considered to be the soul of a person - to live on past the death of the body, it would have rocked people to their cores. Religion (what little there was at the time) would be turned on its head, people who no longer had use of their own bodies, or simply wanted a new one could elect to be transferred, people could be ‘backed-up’ onto computer hard drives. Human beings had been simultaneously running away from and toward death for the entirety of our existence; finally having a method to cheat it...now that would do things to any person, and not necessarily good ones.  
“Well, I did say at the start you had a funny name for an Exo,” The Ghost said, thankfully breaking the ice again.  
“True,” I nodded.  
“In any case, you’re a Guardian now. It doesn’t matter where you came from, it only matters what you’re going to do now. We’ll worry about back-story once we get back to the city,” The Ghost said, putting the matter to bed for the moment at least. “I found you a weapon before we left the lab, I’m not sure if it will work, it’s been in my transmat buffer for a bit longer than I would have liked,” It dropped a little closer to the floor and with a crackling of energy, an assault rifle fizzed into existence. It looked ancient, the red-dot sights cracked and it was covered in a layer of dirt that suggested it had been found under the ruin of the lab. There were two magazines with it, one already attached, the other clipped into an underslung rail.  
“I’ll see if I can make you some armour. Check to make sure the rifle still works,” The Ghost said then drifted off, hanging low to the floor and projecting a beam of light out across the ground in some sort of scanning procedure.  
I picked up the rifle and turned it over in my hands. This wasn’t the first time I had held a weapon, I had designed and built a railgun out of spare parts in the lab over one weekend with the guys to launch cans of lager across the campus, an activity that claimed the lives of two pigeons, broke three windows and nearly got us suspended. I’d also reverse engineered a fusion rifle for use in one of my semi-lethal search and rescue bots but this was actually the first time I had picked up a gun with the understanding I’d be using it to shoot something else in order to defend myself. It was a standard kinetic ballistics weapon; a metal bullet, an explosive to provide thrust, a pin to ignite the explosive. Nothing fancy at all.  
"How aggressive are these Fallen?" I asked, checking the spare magazine. It was only half full and the visible rounds were badly rusted. I began decanting both magazines into the leaf litter, picking out and placing to one side the ones that were most likely to not explode in the breach and take my hand off.  
"Well, considering they're a feudal warrior race governed by a caste system, with status assigned on how many enemies they can cut the heads off in their short, violent lives. Yeah I'd say they're pretty aggressive," The Ghost said. Well at least it was honest.  
"I've never actually shot at anyone before," I said.  
"You're kidding, right?" The Ghost actually stopped doing its scanning and turned to look at me. It may not have been able to give much in the way of facial expression but the disbelief in its voice was plain to hear.  
"No. I'm not," I said, piling the few good rounds I had left next to me and starting to clip them back into the magazine.  
"You have no combat experience?"  
"No,"  
"Before this accident, what were you exactly?" The Ghost asked.  
"Robotics engineer. I'd just finished my doctorate," I said. "Not what you were expecting?"  
"All the other Ghosts I know resurrected soldiers, rangers, usually people who had died during the Collapse. People who were-"  
"Useful?" I finished for it.  
"I wasn't going to say that," The Ghost said.  
"Yeah well, I'm not far wrong am I?" I said. I threw the useless rusted bullets over my shoulder and cocked the rifle, making sure the moving parts were as clear as they could be. A plume of dust and rust flakes flew out of the breach but when I pulled the trigger the action fired off cleanly and without the dull thunk of something obstructing the firing pin. I inserted the one remaining full magazine, put the safety on and slung the nylon band over my shoulder. "And, just because I haven't doesn't mean I can't. Which way?" I got to my feet, checked I could get to the rifle quickly if I needed to and waited for the Ghost to lead on.  
"Hang on, I'm nearly done," It said and went back to scanning the ground. It finished whatever it was doing then drifted up to head height. "Take off the rifle and hold your arms out to both sides," It instructed and I obliged. I stood in position for a few seconds, then the air crackled around me, then as I looked down a simple mottled set of armour had appeared on my body. It wasn't exactly marine grade, but considering it had been made with whatever available mass the Ghost had been able to get hold of, it was pretty damn good.  
I adjusted a few toggles to make the chest piece and the leg armour fit more snugly, making sure the mottled green armour was covering my largely bright white plating that would give me away in this forest. A loosely spun hooded green cloak hung around my shoulders, I pulled the hood up and made sure it was secure so it covered my head but didn't obstruct my vision. The rifle fitted over the top and I tested the whole getup for free range of movement which it did without issue, bringing the rifle up to my eyes in a fraction of a second.  
"There. Looks more official if nothing else," The Ghost said, admiring its handiwork.  
"Thank you," I said, and I did mean it.  
"This way. We're not far away," The Ghost said and dutifully I followed as it drifted in ahead of me into the woods.  
We didn't speak much as we walked, we had both said enough by this point I think and needed to be alone to process everything that had happened. I had to come to terms with the world as it now was, the Ghost had to come to terms with the possibility it had possibly brought the wrong person back to life. I still had so many questions, how many other Guardians were there, where were we going, what was the plan now? All of this could wait, we needed to survive the current ordeal first before the big philosophical questions could be answered. And frankly if this relationship that I had been thrust into was going to work, we needed to come up with something more mundane and cheerful to talk about than the fate of the human race or exactly how fucked we were.  
The forest began to slope upwards, following up to the rim of what I guessed was a massive crater. This was the result of some sort of massive explosion, I didn’t need to be a ballistics expert to see the pulverised stone and fallout craters. The trees became sparser before vanishing all together about thirty yards from the rim which fell quickly out of sight. I crouched down as the Ghost lead us straight up to the rim.  
“Radiation shouldn’t be too bad, wind is in the right direction,” The Ghost said, looking left and right at the top of the crater.  
“This was nuclear?” I asked, crouching on one knee to look over the rim and into the massive bowl below. The sides of the craters were blasted black, the stone and soil turned into a concave wall of molten metal and glass. At the bottom of the bowl some fifty yards below the sheer drop, a lake had formed, a perfect mirror of the cloudless blue sky above. The great divot in the face of the earth was maybe a mile across, possibly more.  
“No, this was orbital strike 52-B2. Occurred on the second of April 2210. Single tungsten round fired from a jury-rigged Zeus class orbital cannon. A Cabal artillery unit was preparing to bombard the city of Haven sixty three miles to the south," The Ghost said.  
"Can't tell me about why I was left to rust in a basement for three hundred years but you can tell me all that about a hole in the ground," I muttered.  
"There's a lot of history here. Haven was one of the last cities to be left standing after the Collapse," The Ghost said.  
"And what happened to it?" I asked.  
"Nuked. Hence the radiation," The Ghost said, tipping its body toward the six o'clock of the crater. The woods rose up to meet the rim on that side also but they had a blackened tinge to them, as if they had been put through a forest fire and had never really recovered, the forest that stretched on behind it looking stunted, sickly. "The transmat zone is four miles north of here, a gun emplacement that once protected Haven. The Vanguard used it as a listening post, hopefully it still has something useful for us to contact the City with,"  
"So it's not even a manned station?" I said, my confidence in the Ghost's plan quickly diminishing. I'd had visions of walking up to a fortified station and being invited in from this madness. Possibly naive of me.  
"It's more of a safe embarkation point for dropping Guardians into the wilderness. We may get lucky. Hopefully," The Ghost said. The inner cynic in me, who had made this entire journey quite unscathed, had to be pushed to the back of my mind as I stood up and followed the little floating machine along the rim of the crater.  
"You been looking for someone for a long time then?" I asked the Ghost as we began to drop down from the rim of the crater, the trees we had come through giving way to what looked like an almost volcanic landscape; all black basalt and crumbling rocks, the wind whipping over the largely flat ground. I didn't bother asking the Ghost what happened here to turn what I remembered to be a green expanse of fields into what looked like the plains of Mordor.  
"Yes. A Ghost searches until it meets with a vessel of the Light that matches its own. There is a Ghost for every Guardian," The Ghost said.  
"So you have been searching since you had been created?" I asked.  
"Yes. Three hundred and sixty four years. I was beginning to get a little worried I wasn't going to find you," The Ghost said.  
"Beginning to get worried? You've got the patience of a saint," I said.  
"Ghosts can be quite single minded I'll have you know," The Ghost said. We continued on in relative quiet to the gun emplacement, occasionally breaking our silence for a quick question about our respective histories. It asked why I became a robotics engineer. I asked it a little about its own adventures as it had searched for me. How it had spanned four continents, over three and a half centuries and faced all the dangers in between, I didn't know. Perhaps the little floating machine was more resourceful than its appearance suggested.  
A couple of difficult hours of walking later, my joints slowly succumbing to over three hundred and fifty years of entropy as I marched across the rugged ground, the gun emplacement came into view. The emplacement was built on a terrace dug into the side of a lonely hill in the otherwise flat expanse. It wasn't on the very crown of the hill, which I guessed was for some defensive reason, but the barrel of the gun which was locked pointing at the sky rose like a thick black flag pole. Whether it was an anti-air gun or some sort of long-range terrestrial artillery, I couldn't tell from this distance.  
We came to what might once have been a perimeter fence and checkpoint, a small cabin with a sign flapping against the chain link fence in the wind. A post for a traffic barrier stood lopsided next to the cabin, bereft of its barrier and the sign was so badly rusted it couldn't be made out. The cabin, enough to host maybe a couple of guards, had been left relatively unscathed though wildlife had obviously been using it as a home for countless generations. Two sets of watery black eyes looked out from a nest in the lintel at us as we passed, still and silent but watchful and not prepared to leave the safety of the nest unless absolutely necessary.  
“So what happens once we call the Tower? Does someone pick us up?” I asked, reaching up to the top of the fence and pulling aside a loose flap of chain link that almost crumbled into rust between my fingers. I stepped through and made sure it was flapped closed behind me.  
“If they can they’ll task another Guardian jumpship to swing low, transmat us up, they won’t even have to land. Or if we’re lucky someone will- MINE!”  
By the time I’d registered the Ghost’s screamed warning it was too late. An explosion sent me flying sideways, damage control systems kicking in to ragdoll my entire body to prevent as much stress as possible. Agony shot through my right side, my mind fully aware of every gory detail of my injuries as my systems tried franticly to poll parts of my body that were simply not there. I went blind in my right ocular input, lost a hand, most of my right leg. Power cells 2 and 4 ruptured, hit by shrapnel and were ejected onto the ground beside me, hissing angrily as their hydrogen/oxygen mix escaped.  
I laid on the ground, watching my hearts literally bleed out into the air, the shredded wires that fed the power into my body crackling and arcing like a tiny electrical storm.  
~Power levels critical. Sub 2% remaining~  
~Hard disk backup systems: Destroyed~  
~Redundant crystal storage: Destroyed~  
No. Nononononononono… No power, with no backup storage meant no me, all of my mind state was in volatile memory, the second there was no power, I’d be gone, a shell. Somewhere in my scrambled brain I tried to think.  
~Power cell 3. Status: Ok. Power Level: 6%~  
Ok. Triage time.  
~Power cell 1 and 5 depleted. Eject~  
Two more flaps snapped open on my chest but the cells were jammed in their housings. I dragged my remaining hand up to the housing and yanked out the two long dead cells, pulling out the wires that went with them. They were dead now, empty, I’d only waste resources with them in me. My vision flickered. I had seconds.  
“Felix?! Felix are you-“  
My fingers closed on the remaining wires and tugged, leaving me with my one remaining cell.  
~Power source critical. Non-essential systems disabled. Shutting down~


End file.
